Dave Checketts had only been to St. Louis a handful of times when he found himself, almost by accident, on the cusp of acquiring one of the city’s most storied landmarks. It was 2005, and Checketts, the head of Sports Capital Partners, wasn’t exactly in the market for real estate; he was in the middle of negotiations to buy the St. Louis Blues from Nancy and Bill Laurie, heirs to the Walmart fortune. The Lauries had only owned the team for six years, but the ailing club was said to be hemorrhaging more than $30 million a year, and the Lauries’ enthusiasm for professional hockey, it seemed, had soured.
If Checketts succeeded in buying the Blues, he would also assume the long-term lease on the Savvis Center (renamed Scottrade Center in 2006), the relatively new $153 million arena where they played—plus a neighboring building that was part of the deal.
“It was always mentioned as if it was a noose around your neck by the hockey club,” Checketts says. “They’d say, ‘Oh, there’s this building next door, but don’t worry, it won’t affect you.’”
The Lauries had arranged for Checketts to tour the Savvis Center, and he was deep inside the maze of the building’s service facilities, inspecting the arena’s kitchen, when he noticed a huge pair of vintage metal doors, which seemed oddly out of place in a building that was more or less just 10 years old. “I asked what was behind them, and they said, ‘We’ll talk about that later,’” Checketts recalls. “I sort of laughed and said, ‘No, I want to know now.’”
The building manager hunted for the right key and then had to struggle with the lock before he was finally able to muscle open the doors. Checketts stepped into the waiting gloom, where there was a kind of strangely muffled silence. The room was large—very large—and as his eyes started to adjust, he began to make out row after row of empty cushioned seats blanketed in dust, the muted gleam of tarnished gilding, a balcony overhead. He looked up at the towering proscenium arch.
“I was on the stage,” he says.
And not just any stage. The unwitting businessman from Utah found himself standing in the middle of what was once hailed as one of the best opera houses west of the Mississippi River, on the same stage that, for almost 60 years, had welcomed a veritable legion of iconic performers, from Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Frank Sinatra to Mikhail Baryshnikov, the Grateful Dead, and R.E.M. President Harry Truman campaigned here on October 30, 1948; four days later, he would be back in St. Louis, just a few blocks west at Union Station, beaming as he held aloft a copy of the Chicago Tribune that mistakenly proclaimed “Dewey Defeats Truman.” Thirty years later, a mad crush of thousands of fans would jam Market Street out front, abandoning their cars on the sidewalks as they stormed the box office, trying to score $10 tickets for a last-minute, one-night-only summer concert by The Rolling Stones.
In the dusky half-light of the theater, one thing was clear: All of that was in the past. The place had been shuttered for more than 15 years, and though it was subject to consistent but minimal maintenance, it appeared all but abandoned—not quite left for dead, but existing in a kind of vegetative state. Thousands of St. Louisans had turned out to celebrate the opening of the building in 1934 with a parade and an extravagant two-week lineup of entertainment, an event Mayor Bernard F. Dickmann called “the greatest civic event since the World’s Fair.” Now the building sat in an architectural coma.
Checketts was smitten, though. “I thought it was stunning—the architecture, the condition it was in,” he says. If it seemed an accident of fate that somehow the future of a 70-year-old Art Moderne–inspired opera house would be tied to the fortunes of a professional hockey team, then it’s no less quirky that it was Checketts who was standing on that stage in 2005. His business was pro sports: Before starting SCP, he had been president and CEO of Madison Square Garden in New York, overseeing the Knicks and the Rangers. But growing up as a kid near Salt Lake City, he had loved heading downtown to two old theaters, the Capitol and the Pioneer Memorial. He had vivid memories of the elaborate annual pageantry surrounding the latter that celebrated the Mormon pioneers, complete with a reenactment of a plague of crop-ravaging locusts being devoured by the miraculous appearance of a flock of seagulls. Even more important, he had already managed the meticulous restoration of another high-profile theatrical landmark when he was in New York: Radio City Music Hall.
A group led by Checketts bought the Blues, along with the lease on Savvis Center and the moldering opera house, for $153 million. The next season, leaving the Savvis Center after a home game on a long winter night, Checketts recalls stopping at the intersection of 15th and Market streets and looking over at the dark, hulking mass of limestone and granite, which for all its ashen solemnity seemed more like an enormous mausoleum than a theater.
“I used to sit at that stoplight and think, ‘This is depressing—we need to find a way to bring this building back,’” he says.
When Aretha Franklin and Jay Leno take the stage on October 1 to headline the gala reopening of the opera house, they will be the first performers to appear beneath the huge medallion relief of King Louis IX that crowns the proscenium since May 3, 1991, when the St. Louis Philharmonic Orchestra performed Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5. A brief item in the following Sunday’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch was titled, “After the Curtain, Opera House Awaits New Look.” In retrospect, that reads a bit like coming across the headline “Titanic to Sail for England.” Newly rechristened as the Peabody Opera House (for the Fortune 500 coal company headquartered down the street, Peabody Energy, that bought the naming rights for an undisclosed sum), the renovated theater has taken as its logo one of the iconic stone bears that flank its entrance. But it’s the stylized Greek masks alternating across the building’s facade that might best symbolize the tragicomic 20-year saga since the members of the philharmonic packed up their instruments and, essentially, locked the doors behind them.
Long before it was the Peabody or Kiel, it was known simply as the Municipal Auditorium, a prosaic moniker whose modest simplicity simultaneously supported and belied the building’s noble aspirations. “It was a palace for the people,” says local preservation expert Michael Allen. To start with, it wasn’t simply an auditorium, but rather a convention hall, sports arena, and opera house spaciously laid out across more than four city blocks, housed beneath a single roof and set behind a monumental limestone facade. The 3,500-seat opera house was conjoined with the 12,000-seat arena, separated by two massive steel fire curtains weighing more than 20 tons each that could be raised to create one large auditorium. The ground floor provided more than 90,000 square feet of exhibition space for visiting trade shows and conventions.
“What’s important to remember is that not only was the Municipal Auditorium ambitious, but it was part of a much larger and more ambitious civic project,” says Allen. He’s referring to the auditorium’s place among the imposing congregation of buildings surrounding Memorial Plaza, which itself was part of an even larger overall plan to remake St. Louis into a modern city. Successive waves of immigration coupled with mass industrialization had led to the rapid concentration of the country’s population in urban areas by the early 20th century, and in their hodgepodge struggle to accommodate the influx, cities had gained a reputation for slums, pestilence, and a kind of corrosive moral climate.
In 1923, Mayor Henry Kiel managed to convince two-thirds of the voters in St. Louis to approve the largest package of municipal bonds that had ever been issued, around $87 million’s worth, the proceeds of which were largely spent on vital infrastructure improvements, such as water and sewage systems. But a substantial portion of the money, about $16 million, was earmarked for Memorial Plaza and two new buildings that would help realize an ongoing vision for the civic heart of the city: the towering neoclassical Civil Courts Building and the Municipal Auditorium. The entire plan was based on the tenets of the City Beautiful movement, a burgeoning national campaign that through the creation of grand public architecture and open, park-like spaces aimed for something far greater than a simple cosmetic makeover of America’s teeming urban centers. As historian William H. Wilson once wrote, “Important as beauty was for itself, its role in environmental conditioning was never far from the minds of civic center advocates. The civic center’s beauty would reflect the souls of the city’s inhabitants, inducing order, calm, and propriety therein. Second, the citizen’s presence in the center, together with other citizens, would strengthen pride in the city and awaken a sense of community with fellow
urban dwellers.”
The festivities surrounding the auditorium’s dedication in 1934 constituted an orgy of civic pride and seemed explicitly designed to communicate one thing: that the city’s $6 million investment in its new civic palace was really an investment in its citizens. The program was far from the sort of star-studded extravaganza we might expect today; the only performers on hand who seemed to qualify as celebrities were the president’s cousin Emily Roosevelt, who sang the national anthem, and a handful of nationally renowned opera sopranos. Instead, the opera theater’s stage was given over to a cavalcade of local talent too numerous to be identified individually: a “massed choir of 500 drawn from St. Louis churches” sang at an ecumenical religious service, while a cast of 550 presented a “musical history” of the city the following week. A Musician’s Guild concert showcased the entire philharmonic along with the Bell Telephone Chorus (40 members), the Liederkranz Chorus (40 members), the Acapella Choir (40 members), and a piano ensemble consisting of 14 grand pianos with 28 players. The next day included “a giant presentation of Folk Dances, Songs, and Plays featuring a grand cast of 950” from more than a dozen local cultural groups, ranging from the United German Singers of St. Louis to the Chinese Merchants Association.
In 1943, the Municipal Auditorium was renamed in honor of the mayor who had ardently campaigned for a vision of a modern St. Louis, but by then, the country was in the midst of another world war. The city’s population peaked less than a decade later, and even though the opera house continued to present everything from the Supremes to the St. Louis Symphony, by the mid-1980s the city had pretty much given up on promoting the Kiel and simply struggled to maintain it. With the notable exception of the Miss Universe pageant in 1983, the huge arena portion of the building was largely given over to Saint Louis University Billikens games and pro wrestling. Anybody who showed up in 1991 to see the smackdown between Ric “Nature Boy” Flair and Jorge “El Gigante” González could be forgiven for glancing up at the inscription high above the opera house’s frieze and reading it with a smirking sense of irony: “A TEMPLE ON WHOSE ALTAR IS EVER GLOWING THE FLAME AT WHICH PATRIOTISM MAY BE REKINDLED.”
In January 1996, Post-Dispatch columnist Greg Freeman wrote, “It should be pretty clear why a lot of St. Louisans feel that they’ve been suckered when it comes to the Kiel Opera House.” A year later, he revisited the theme: “What you’ll read about here is a tale of a promise unkept, a promise made to an excited—probably too excited—city that makes a lot of folks here feel as if we were a bunch of saps.” By then, the opera house had been dark for almost six years, and Freeman would continue to inveigh against the forces that kept the building shuttered until his death in 2002.
What to do with the white elephant on Market Street had become a perennial question, ever since the building’s leaseholders essentially said that they had no intention of reopening it. Kiel Center Partners, a consortium of 19 area corporations that owned the Blues starting in 1991, had managed to convince the city to demolish the 12,000-seat Kiel Auditorium portion in 1992 to make way for a new arena. As part of the deal, the opera house would be spared, and the partnership agreed to renovate and reopen it. But a labor dispute engulfed the NHL just as the new arena was scheduled to debut, and as the sport struggled to rebound, the owners began pouring more than $20 million a year into the franchise to cover their losses. Testifying before the St. Louis Board of Aldermen in 1995, William Haviluk Jr., then president of Kiel Center Partners, publically reversed course and maintained that the organization had “no further legal obligation” to renovate the opera house beyond the $2.5 million it had already spent in basic repairs.
The newly appointed city comptroller, Darlene Green, found herself walking into a political maelstrom. An outraged Board of Aldermen voted to direct Green to enforce the terms of Kiel Center Partners’ lease, even if that meant going to court; she demurred. Instead, Green opted to solicit private funds to commission the nonprofit Urban Land Institute to study potential uses for the building. It’s a decision Green defends today, saying that hauling the Blues’ owners before a jury would have been a waste of taxpayer dollars and could have had a chilling effect on downtown redevelopment. “Just the idea that you don’t have city officials taking private investors to court goes a long way in telling the investor community that you support what they’re trying to do for the city,” she says.
To the small but vocal band of citizens campaigning on behalf of the opera house, including Ed Golterman, the grandson of one of the opera house’s original producers, the results of the ULI study were disappointing. The study’s authors expressly recommended against reopening the opera house as a performing-arts venue, noting that the city already had a viable theater of similar size, the 4,278-seat Fox, and plans were afoot to build a new $50 million performing-arts center at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Citing the discouraging downward drift of the city’s population, the ULI concluded that there simply weren’t enough people to support that much live entertainment. Why not transform the Kiel into another kind of cultural destination, the authors suggested, like a jazz-and-blues museum or a satellite of the Smithsonian Institution dedicated to the nebulous concept of the “American character”?
Over the next decade, there would be a slew of proposals for what to do with the Kiel Opera House: a Ulysses S. Grant library and memorial, a Hard Rock Café, a downtown outpost of the Saint Louis Art Museum. Not long after his election, Mayor Clarence Harmon tried to convince UM–St. Louis chancellor Blanche Touhill to abandon her plans for the arts center on campus and rehab the Kiel instead. A citizens’ committee calling itself Kiel School for the Arts advocated revamping it as a performing-arts high school, while at the turn of the millennium, an editorial writer for the Post-Dispatch cynically suggested that it was probably destined to become the world’s largest Walgreens. In 2004, local developer Don Breckenridge appeared to come close to realizing plans to renovate and reopen the opera house as a bona fide theater, but he died after a short battle with cancer and the project fizzled. As for that other theater in town, by 1996, the Fox had just emerged from a rocky inaugural decade following its own dazzling restoration, and David Fay, who was then Fox Associates’ president, was convinced that there was only one surefire way to make money off the old Kiel: Turn it into a parking garage.
It’s funny what happened to the word “civic” in the nearly 80 years since the city marked the dedication of its “great triumph” on Market Street. “It was a civic auditorium; you’ll see for yourself,” says one catty Fox supporter, who declined to be named in this article. “There’s not that sense of ‘Wow’ when you walk in the door.” And it’s true that anyone arriving at the newly renovated Peabody expecting the lavish ornamentation of the Fox, the “Siamese Byzantine” style that architectural writer Robert Sharoff has described as “an evident euphemism for anything goes,” might well be disappointed. But to tar the Peabody with our own contemporary connotations of the word “civic”—to call to mind those dreary drop ceilings, ad hoc partitions, and fluorescent tubes that in so many public buildings today reflect a perpetually cash-strapped government’s efforts to just make do—hardly does justice to the stately and dignified spirit of elegance that defines the opera house’s sense of decor.
Even a full three months before the Peabody is scheduled to reopen, when a tour still requires the issue of hard hats and safety goggles, it’s difficult not to be impressed with the idea that all of this marble, all of this gilding, not to mention the ornate plasterwork of the ceilings and the solid oak trim, was erected during the first dispiriting years of the Great Depression to embody a collective spirit of forward-looking optimism that can seem somehow quaint today.
Dismissing the opera house as a mere “civic auditorium” also discredits its meticulous design as a performance venue. As a number of music aficionados have pointed out, including Post-Dispatch classical-music critic and former opera singer Sarah Bryan Miller, the opera house remains the largest theater in St. Louis that was specifically designed as a live performance space, modeled on the great opera houses of Europe, with impeccable acoustics, unobstructed sightlines, and a balcony surprisingly close to the stage. Both the Fox and Powell Hall originally opened as movie theaters.
But as inspiring as the opera house may be, there remains a pressing question that has been at the heart of the debate since its closing in 1991: Can a theater built for St. Louis in the early 20th century survive in the 21st? Dave Checketts may have fallen in love with the opera house almost as soon as he set foot on its stage, but he wasn’t about to go head over heels. He partnered with local developers Chris and Joe McKee, and while publicly he cites the brothers’ “passion for St. Louis” as fundamental to his decision to work with them, the fact that the McKee family has proven adept at negotiating plum development deals with the city was no doubt a factor as well. The McKees’ father, Paul, has worked to secure tens of millions of dollars in tax credits and other public incentives for his proposed redevelopment of St. Louis’ North Side.
Of the nearly $80 million being spent to renovate the Peabody, more than 80 percent is being financed through municipal bonds, tax credits, and other public funds; factor in other government subsidies, and the total could be higher. Checketts won’t confirm his company’s financial stake in the project, nor will the McKees disclose how much they put up to become operating partners. Joe, at least, rankles at any criticism that too much government money is being used to transform the opera house into an essentially for-profit enterprise. “It’s still a public asset, owned by the city, and it was sitting empty,” he says. “The tools we used weren’t created for us—tax credits weren’t created for us. Some of these are federal, nationwide programs. And the return on those dollars far outweighs the cost to the community.”
Few St. Louisans would seem to disagree. Preservation expert Allen calls the plans to reopen the Peabody “magnificent,” and Mayor Francis Slay hails it as “an investment for the long-term future of the city.” Veteran concert promoter Steve Schankman—who is probably one of the few St. Louisans (if not the only one) to be able to say that he not only attended shows at the old Kiel, but also produced them and even performed onstage (playing trumpet with the Impact Soul Revue)—says, “What’s the point in talking about whether we need it or not? It’s here now; it’s been restored. Let’s get on the bandwagon; let’s rejoice. It’s got a great history, and it deserves to have the lights back on.”
Among the few remaining holdouts would seem to be the Fox and its supporters. As recently as last year, Richard Baker, the president of Fox Associates, was quoted in the Post-Dispatch calling the Peabody project “a horrible waste of public money. At a time when the city is cutting back or charging for services, I don’t see how they can justify spending money on a venue that isn’t needed,” he said.
Baker admits that through it all, the Fox’s protests in the media have come off as little more than “sour grapes,” but it seems that at the root of his tone lies a deep frustration as the Fox has tried to find someone—anyone—to listen to its take. Baker still half-heartedly defends his predecessor’s idea of converting the old Kiel into a parking garage, saying that the suggestion was never made out of spite, but was based on the economic realities of trying to run a for-profit theater.
To Baker, it’s not just that St. Louis has too many venues—though he maintains that that’s true, too, pointing to the fact that since the Kiel closed in 1991, a whole range of performance spaces have popped up, from large venues like SLU’s Chaifetz Arena and The Family Arena in St. Charles to smaller venues like UM–St. Louis’ Touhill Performing Arts Center and The Pageant. It’s that there are simply not enough moneymaking shows to fill all of those seats. The Peabody is poised to go head-to-head with the Fox to compete for touring Broadway shows, but Baker says there are only about four or five such touring productions each year, and the economics of landing such shows can be pretty dismal for your average theater. Broadway producers calculate the cost to take a show on the road and split it among the theaters on the tour before tacking on a royalty fee, typically 10 percent of the gross. It’s only after the theater forks out the money to cover those fees as well as its own operating costs that it splits the profit (if there is one) with the producers. That split? It can be as high as 90–10 for a blockbuster show like Wicked, with the lion’s share going back to New York.
“We depend on volume: We’ve got to sell tickets and fill seats to make it work,” Baker says. As for concerts, they just prove his point, he says. A surplus of concert venues nationwide has led to skyrocketing ticket prices, as local theaters bid against one another to land choice acts.
“People think that if you run a monopoly, you must be raping and pillaging, but we’re not,” Baker contends. “We’ve had the luxury of saving our patrons money over the years because every time producers come in, they want us to raise ticket prices. They say, ‘Well, this is what tickets go for in New York,’ and we say, ‘This isn’t New York.’ We can do that because we’re the only game in town.” Perhaps bracing for the competition with the Peabody and to garner some headlines of its own, the Fox recently announced that it was undergoing $2 million
in improvements and renovations, which will include sprucing up its Grand Boulevard facade. Sumptuous appearances aside, Baker maintains that the theater operates on a meager 2- to 3-percent profit margin, not much different than your average grocery store.
The Fox’s arguments don’t sway Joe McKee. “We’ve got to keep adding things,” he says. “We tend to think in this town that if we add it, we’re not worthy of it and it’s going to take away from something else.” The
McKees, admittedly, have never owned a theater before, but they, along with Checketts, have put a good deal of thought into how to make the Peabody viable, from completely renovating the cargo bay (to accommodate today’s larger sets) to adding tiny details like cup holders on the theater’s 3,100 seats.
The McKee brothers seem most enthusiastic when they talk about the renovation process itself, which included sending paint samples to a lab to determine the colors that were originally used in the opera house and standing on seven-story scaffolding in the main theater for a painstaking examination of the gilding around the dome. After spending more than a year immersed in such details, they say their anticipation for opening night has built almost to a crescendo.
“I’m just looking forward to hearing that first note,” says Chris McKee, “and experiencing it the way everyone has talked about for years.”
